Field Notes

The second most important component of producing 3D animations: lighting In my previous post, I mentioned how important modeling was to producing 3D animations. While I still believe this to be true, there is a close second to modeling I’ve been learning about. In this post, I want to explore the techniques I used for lighting this scene in Cinema 4D. ...

It’s all about the model After finishing School of Motion’s course on Cinema 4D, I picked up a license from Maxon. I’m hooked. I learned quickly after navigating through their course-load on modeling, animation, lighting, texturing, rendering and compositing…modeling is everything. If you don’t have a model, what do you have? I’m just going to spend the next year modeling whatever I can, whenever I can. ...

4 tactics for modern learning ecosystems I just wrapped up my first course on 3-D graphic design and animation through a Florida-based company named School of Motion. These people are incredible for several reasons. The tactics they use can be used by anybody in the business of change management (whatever that means), corporate communications or corporate training. I want to walk through them here. ...

Exploring 3D Modeling for Video Animation I’ve been noticing a trend in people at work asking for the “drawing hand” videos. Everybody loves those videos that take really great speeches and add visuals to them. In an effort to cut through the noise generated inside a large corporation, people are flocking to image libraries and new-age clip art to help them sprinkle in powerful analogies, similes and metaphors into their presentations. ...

The Arena A friend and co-worker of mine introduced me to this wonderful quote from Theodore Roosevelt. After hearing it enough, I had this scene come to mind. I’ve been experimenting with animation, a medium I think more “knowledge workers” will have to embrace if they want to actually disseminate their knowledge. ...

Recruiting for your corporate startup…be ready to filter out the window shoppers I’ve started a number of projects at work. They usually start the same way. I get an a-ha moment, tell some people about it, and then I try to get some people together to build on the insight until we can get someone to fund us. Every once and a while we get a buyer interested enough to buy. The usual pattern is a bunch of excitement builds. People are asking to be included on meetings. Everyone wants to share their opinion. People gather for “offsites” so they can discuss their opinions even further. Then, when it’s time to get to work you can just watch the crowd of “supporters” thin one-by-one until only a handful of people remain. I used to be so discouraged by this. I used to think people lost faith in me or I said or did something wrong. It wasn’t until I took my first swing at starting my own company that I found out how wrong I was. ...

GraphDB: Mapping your network Just a quick post today, but something I hope you find especially helpful. It’s actually a follow-up to a post I wrote last week on corporate “customer” relationship management. A colleague of mine read my entry and promptly and generously introduced me to a technology I wish I would’ve known about sooner. It’s called Graph Database. A quick Google search or gander on YouTube can tell you more than I can at this point. In an effort to make you actually do those things, graph databases give you a more intuitive view of relationships between the “nodes” in a collection of data. You can graph relationships, view properties and I’m guessing do some other cool stuff. I’ll be diving into this Udemy course on graph databases (using a “free” product called Neo4J) and will report back on what I learn. I put “free” in quotes because I registered my email and they told me the 30-day clock started ticking. I’m guessing after that they either need me to buy a license or give them more personal data they can add to my digital twin. ...

The best things in life (and at work) take time Bread dates back to the Neolithic era. Sliced bread hasn’t even celebrated its 100th anniversary yet. It took man thousands of years to finally invent the greatest thing since…ever. Whether we like it or not, the things we want to happen - no matter how revolutionary, inspiring or helpful - don’t always happen on our schedule. ...

What does a digital transformation look like? What do you feel when you look at the image below? What does it make you think about? How do you think people looked at Henry Ford when he talked about the assembly line? What did they think when he planned for the average household to afford a car? What did people say when Ford started to pay his employees ten times more than anyone else? After his success, every aspiring auto manufacturer had to industrially “transform” their business if they wanted to move forward. ...

The Case for the Internal CRM I promise I’m not trying to sell a product. Honestly, I wish I was because this would be incredible if I had one of these. Without a doubt the hardest thing about documenting a huge company’s digital transformation is uncovering the things you don’t even know you don’t know. A good friend and business partner of mine says we are simultaneously starving for and drowning in information. How can that be? How can a global organization with hundreds of thousands of employees, partners and customers not get the right information to the people who need it? ...